Cognito Networks: Consolidating Complete IoT Solutions

Cognito Networks delivers Internet of Things (IoT) system with packaged applications that empower business firms and SMBs to manage and scale sensor networks and automate work processes. Customers can streamline their operations, reduce costs, and create competitive differentiation without compromising multivendor IoT interoperability and administration.

Cognito Networks, Inc. is a state of the art IoT solutions organization situated in San Francisco Bay Area and India. Cognito Networks is a privately held company and was set up in August 2014.

Cognito Networks addresses three critical problems seen in enterprises in the design and deployment of IoT solutions:

Multivendor IoT Interoperability and Management across sensor networks and applications

Business actions based on data and insights from sensors and things

Ability to simulate sensors, networks, and operations to validate IoT solution before deployment

Cognito Networks consolidates complete IoT solutions including sensors, gateways, and cloud service, in client organizations. The company is focused on creating intelligent Cognito IoT cloud software, policy and workflow automation system while integrating with numerous gateways from partners and third parties. The software is scalable to run on compute systems ranging from Raspberry Pi to a multi-core framework with support for Ubuntu operating system environment, thus providing flexibility in deployment from the edge to the cloud.

Cognito Networks has been an extremely valuable partner as we deploy IoT applications into several industry verticals. The ability to achieve multivendor IoT policy management and abstraction of sensor data has enabled us to rapidly evolve our IoT solutions to meet our customer needs.

-Doug Junkins, CTO, NTT Innovation Institute

Cognito IoT Cloud Service can be expanded in either a private cloud inside an enterprise or in a public cloud such as AWS, Azure, or IBM Cloud. Also, Cognito Networks provides personalization services to tailor the customer needs. The Cognito Solution Architecture constitutes four primary components – IoT Application Cloud Service, Gateways, Sensors, and APIs.

IoT Application Cloud Service includes a rich Policy and Workflow Manager to integrate business workflows and automate operating procedures. Policies can be configured to create autonomous closed-loop IoT systems at the edge or in the cloud.

IoT Gateway software integrates sensors and things to establish device independent abstraction to Cognito cloud services. Cognito supports leading gateways from partners like Sierra Monitor, Option Wireless, and Senet to cover a wide array of IoT protocols including traditional protocols like Modbus, BACnet, RS232, RS422, RS485, and LonWorks, as well as newer protocols such as WiFi, ZigBee, LTE, and LoRa.

Mobile App, to receive critical alerts and notifications from the IoT network and for sensor monitoring

Secure, RESTful APIs for integration with third party software applications and analytics engines

Cognito Enterprise SolutionAlthough the framework can support multitude of use cases, Cognito Networks is currently focused on applications for Energy Management (Ventilation Systems, Climate Control, and Lighting Control), Safety and Security, and Enterprise Workflow Automation. In addition to streamlining operations, typical savings of up to 35% are projected in these use cases.

Cognito Networks CEO, Kittur Nagesh, is an established engineer and entrepreneur having over twenty-five years of experience in engineering, product management, and marketing roles in established companies Intel, HP, Cisco, and Juniper Networks, as well as in startups.

He has an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Iowa and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. Nagesh has filed for over 30 patents and has been granted 16 patents so far in the areas of networking, policy management, wireless communications, and interoperability.

The future goals of the company are to strengthen their business in the areas of energy management, lighting, ventilation and climate control, and workflow automation by expanding engineering and business development groups in the Bay Area and India. On the technology front, Cognito Networks is focused on delivering closed-loop IoT systems for maximizing benefits to enterprises as Information Technology and Operations Technology converge. The company has filed for numerous provisional patents in the areas of IoT abstraction, traffic engineering, security, and closed-loop policy systems.